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China’s Dalian Wanda Group Partners With a New Zealand’s Blockchain Startup, No ICO Involved

Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group’s internet arm, Wanda Internet Technology Group, has established a strategic cooperation with Centrality, an Auckland-based blockchain technology company, to create a blockchain-based ecosystem that connects consumers and retailers, according to the statement released by Centrality on March 12.

The strategic alliance, no investment or financing involved, includes two phases: the two parties will focus on technical cooperation at the first stage, jointly developing and promoting PL^G, Centrality’s open-source public blockchain platform and, growing the decentralized applications on the platform. Following the technology integration, they expect to foster an ecosystem by expanding circles of users and of business partners at the second stage.

“Our businesses are completely aligned on the opportunities for blockchain and believe that working together we can push for the adoption of blockchain within the government, industrial and consumer sectors.”Centrality CEO, Aaron McDonald said.

Centrality, founded in July 2016, is a venture studio that partners with various innovators in key industries to create a marketplace of Dapps. It has raised the equivalent of US$80 million in selling their own “tokens” in January.

However, Wanda stressed that this cooperation does not involve ICO activities which are heavily cracked down in China, but the two parties will collaborate on developing blockchain technology , building the community, sharing talents,and promoting rcommercial applications.

“Blockchain is the underlying technology of the ‘internet of Value’. And this technology can be applied in many OMO (online and offline integration) scenarios.” Wanda Internet Technology Group said.

In fact, Wanda Group, the property development giant, is an early player in the blockchain industry. It launched its own blockchain research platform in June 2016, and became the first China-based premier member of blockchain consortium Hyperledger three months later. And in September of that same year,Wanda announced its blockchain platform Polaris for smart supply chains, pharmaceutical management, finance and invoicing.

Wanda Internet Technology Group, spun off from Wanda Financial Group in October 2016, runs Wanda’s online retail and finance services with around 6,000 employers. The company is tasked with leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, to digitalize physical industries and to speed up the convergence of online and offline retailing.